The core component of a chatbot is its natural-language processing framework. Chatbots process data presented to them using natural-language processing through a process commonly known as parsing. The parsed user input is then interpreted and an appropriate response is sent back to the user based on what the user wants, as deciphered from the input. The chatbot might need to seek help from a knowledge base and historical transaction data store to deal with the user's request appropriately.
Chatbots can be broadly grouped into the following two categories:
- Retrieval-based models: These models generally rely on lookup tables or a knowledge base to select an answer from a predefined set of answers. Although this method might seem naive, most chatbots in production are of this kind. Of course, there can be various degrees of sophistication with regard to...